Bernard Bate: Speaking Swadeshi, Madras 1907
One strong theme running through Prof. Sivathamby’s work is the integral link between linguistic practice and social transformation. In that spirit, this paper will explore the link between the emergence of vernacular political oratory in the Swadeshi movement and the ability of political people to organize the masses into effective political agency. The Swadeshi movement was born in 1905 with the partition of Bengal. The movement spread from Bengal throughout some parts of India such as Central Provinces and the Madras Presidency, in particular the Tamil-speaking Madras City, Tuticorin (Tutukudi) and Tirunelveli, and the Telugu-speaking Madras City and the Krishna and Godavari deltas. This short-lived and geographically limited movement for economic swadeshism, boycott of foreign goods, and national education was crushed by the middle of 1908 by a colonial government outraged and terrified by a new set of practices, attitudes and classes of political agents. But a number of features of the movement, from ideological swadeshism to boycott continued on as elements of political action in India through Independence and beyond. Perhaps most importantly, the Swadeshi movement saw the beginnings of a major communicative revolution in politics, from English to swadeshi languages as the medium of political propaganda in public meetings. Indeed, 20th century politics would have unfolded quite differently without the call to the political of the common person that was the essence of the shift from Anglophone to swadeshi political communication. This paper will think through this communicative revolution in terms of Prof. Sivathamby’s broader concerns regarding language, culture, and political identity.
Biographical Statement:
Dr. Bate’s research focuses on Tamil, South Asia, language, politics, gender and the historical ethnography of language. Previous research examined political and literary oratory in the contexts of its production in late twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. He is currently exploring the history of Tamil oratory and textuality in order to document the emergence of political oratory in the early twentieth century. His recent publications include “Arumuga Navlar, Saivite sermons, and the delimitation of religion, c. 1850″ in Language, Genre, and the Historical Imagination in South India, a special issue of the Indian Economic and Social History Review (2005); “Shifting subjects: elocutionary revolution in 18th Century America and 20th Century India” in Language and Communication 24:4 (2004); “Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers: The Poetry and Iconography of Democratic Power” in Everyday Life in South Asia (2002).
